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How’s THAT for a title? My spam is going to be off the charts with terrifying awesomeness in about ten seconds with incredible offers to enlarge my penis to help me make big boom in bedroom during super happy sexy fun time!

Also, my butler and good friend Woy has come up with the best word in the world to describe terrifying awesomeness. Ready?

FUNSTURBING!

I’ll use it in a sentence. “The magnitude of my baby’s farts is positively funsturbing.”

Here’s a word my brother-in-law Ginny Slims (as his wife Tina Fey calls him on her blog) made up years ago for a bodily function that to this day in 2012 has no associated word. Ready?

Isn’t that perfect? Not quite yet to the point where you need to poop, but your body is flicking the warning switches that things are really solidifying down there and you might want to get near a human waste receptacle at your earliest convenience.

All that to say this. WHAT IN THE EVER-LOVING HECK IS FIFTY SHADES OF GREY?!

A text from my sister who shall remain nameless but her name is Princess Aurora of Wexfordshire.

PA: Okay. Don’t judge. But have been reading Fifty Shades of Grey … AND LOVE IT!!!! Can’t put it down! Get the sample and tell me you don’t want to continue to read!!! I have had a smile on my face all day just thinking about the book.

Tina Fey: I’m judging. I’m judging so hard I can feel my temple vein throbbing with a near stroke.

Do you see what a worry wart she is? It’s comical. I bet she Googled, “Am I having a stroke?” not three minutes after she typed that and then she determined that she did indeed suffer a mini-stroke and then she probably ate a hundred mini-Three Musketeers bars to comfort herself.

Princess: REALLY?! You didn’t like it?

Tina: Are you kidding!!!!???? Did you not read my blog review of the sample? I wanted someone to kill both characters. I HATED IT! You need to read my post about it. I wanted someone to pay me for the 45 minutes of my life I wasted reading it!

Princess: I love it! Like a crazy soap!

Tina: I’ll forgive you since you were not an English major who learned to appreciate things like character development and believable dialogue.

Princess: I have a lesser class taste for literature. I’m not as cultured as ya. I like the mommy porn. ;) Also, who do you know is into that????? As I read it, I think, “Who in their right mind would agree to that!?” But I still can’t put it down!!

Tina: [Name redacted] She’s a big ole BDSM junkie.

Pens Fan: Princess is addicted to Mommy Porn!?

Princess: Pens Fan, you will love it!!! Muchacho will thank me that I gotcha to read it!!!! Many steamy nights ahead for ya, girl!!!!

Let me pause here so that I can find some more question marks and exclamation points because they’ve used so many that all I’ve got left are some schwas and half an ampersand.

Tina: How are we related?

Pens Fan: Princess, I have no clue what you are talking about. I probably wouldn’t understand any of it.

Princess: Tina, it’s like wine. I can drink two buck chuck and love it whereas a wine aficionado (yea took me 2 min to spell correct word) would think it is crap. That is crazy about your friend! I had to wiki what BDSM even was.

Pens Fan: Princess and I have simple literary minds. We aren’t smart like you and Ginny. :)

Tina: You are smart. You just have hideously crappy taste in literature.

Princess: Pens Fan, read it. TRUST ME!!!!

Pens Fan: K. I will.

Tina: I’m hanging my head in sorrow.

Somewhere, my poor father’s brain just exploded and he has fifty shades of grey matter on his computer screen.

Somewhere, Tina Fey is Googling “Could my head literally just explode without warning?”

P.S. As I won’t be posting as often, you can subscribe via email using that subscribe box in the sidebar. You can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook as I’ll be sharing smaller tidbits there and will also link to my new posts as well.

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43 Comments

Fun fact: Originally it was written as a Twilight fanfic. It gained popularity online and was altered so it could be published without Stephanie Meyer getting her holy panties in a bunch. Finding out it was based on Twilight explained the terribleness and appeal of it for me.

The popularity of this series has become a big pet peeve of mine. Yes, I was an English major, but I’m also a voracious reader and have, well, common sense! Not only is it horribly written, but I wanted to bitchslap Ana every time she talked about her inner goddess. It was also news to me that someone’s eyes could show so many emotions. I could barely read it, I was so annoyed by it all.

If you want erotica, there’s better examples. Even Anne Rice’s The Mummy is “mainstream” and much better written than this drivel.

I just don’t understand how people are so amazed by it. It’s not like it’s anything new other than it came from Twilight Fanfiction. C’mon. . .Anne Rice’s Claiming of Sleeping Beauty that is much better was written decades ago. Even the BDSM-themed Exit to Eden by Anne Rice (DO NOT WATCH THE MOVIE) is a better book.

Yes, I was thinking exactly this. That if women read better erotica, they would know how awful 50 Shades is. I guess I’m kind of happy for the people for whom it is working. So to speak. And I’m sure there is many a grateful husband out there!

As a librarian, I’m compelled to make a book list of better stuff. The Story of O. Lady Chatterly’s Lover. What else can we add? (And yes, this is the stuff that librarians do. . .support your local library. . .it’s our job to find you better erotica!)

My opinion is much more closely aligned with Tina Fey’s and the fact that it’s based on the (terribly terribly written) Twilight books does not move me with curiosity.

Your two new words, however are brilliant, and I will be teaching my husband about agillitation, as I believe he is super concerned with that almost all the time (when he’s not thinking about sexy fun time), and now he has a word for it. Thanks!

The worst part about this is now people are starting to thinkit is okay to put this part of themselves forward. I myself have seen more and heard of more first hand tales of people wearing odd items like dog collars with leashes out in public when the rest of their attire is very soccer mom mini-van.

@Dana – thanks for that bit of info. I read all 3 books and thought it sounded like an X rated version of Twilight.

That being said – yes, the characters are hollow and have less personality than my lab mix. (Who says “oh baby” every time he gets a twinge in his jockeys?) They were easy reads and slightly entertaining.

What I don’t get is why everyone has their panties in a bunch about the “BDSM”. Really? Doesn’t anyone watch HBO or Cinemax or read a Harlequin Romance novel? That was the tamest explanation of bondage and domination I’ve ever seen. I read them because of all the hype and was seriously disappointed.

I read the first book to see what the fuss was about and didn’t like it. I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t like it. There was too much twenty-something imagined-angst, and at thirty-nine-and-eleven-twelfths, I felt too old to be reading it. Tell me that same story (more well written, of course) with thirty-and-almost-forty-something characters, and maybe I’ll like it better. It was the same thing for Twilight — I read it and didn’t much care for it. There was too much teenage angst, and I felt like I was crashing a high school party.

Also, with that ampersand, I think I owe you half of one back. We won’t talk about the dashes and emdashes.

That IS a good article. Thanks for linking. Particularly this part:
“Very little of the conversation about Fifty Shades of Grey has included people who actually participate in the BDSM lifestyle and can speak intelligently and ethically on the subject even though these people exist and are easy to find. Instead, people who know not of what they speak have made wild, lazy, insulting, or inaccurate conjectures about BDSM all because a writer, who is not terribly familiar with the lifestyle (she did a lot of online research, don’t you know), thought kink would be a nice hook to hang her Twilight fan fiction on.”

Is it any wonder that these books are so popular? Gauge the response against the landscape of reality television. All these people come out against shows like “Teen Mom” and “Dance Moms” and “Bachelor” and yet… they are popular.

This is just art imitating life. They exist because society gives them the license to do so.

Not to mention social media and the Internet give people greater visibility to this stuff, whereas 20 years ago it barely registered with the publishing industry. Fanfics were a part of USENET and geek culture but now, anyone with an Internet connection, a pulse, and a basic grasp on the English language can put out drivel and get it published.

Al Gore opened a Pandora’s box of degradation which has slowly begun to decimate civilization.

I flew through the first book in about a weekend, consciously ignoring the terrible writing. Now I’m forcing myself to finish the second, and I’m just tired of these people. Can’t they be in the same room for 10 minutes without jumping each other? Also, I’ve lost track of how many times she’s used the words ‘mercurial’ and ‘Holy shit!’.

Although I have to admit, I found the inner goddess pretty entertaining.

George Carlin did a great bit on the “agillitation” noise, called borborygmi:

“Belly noise, gut rumblings…when your stomach is talking to you. Your stomach is talking to you! I think that’s call borborygmi. Always told it was called borborygmi. Which would be a good name for it- (silly stomach noises:) BORBORYGMI! MUNYA! NEEYA WUNEYA BWOYOYOYOYYOY! That’s a familiar one, right? OYOYOYOYOYOY! D’ya ever notice that one bubble sounds a lot like the last one did? Goes the same way- past the corn, around the peas, under the beef, over the gravy. WOOYAYA WUNYA BWOYOYOYOYOY! One of the great times that your stomach does a lot of this orating is when you’re sitting in the dentist’s waiting room. Everything’s quiet, man. You’re reading ‘Cuspid Annual’ and your stomach is showing off or attracting attention- WAAAAAA! OONYEE WAAA! Saying things like WERE POOR! WEEREEE POOOOOR! And you try to shuffle the book and go RRRRMRMRM.”

I’ve read all 3 (because I have to finish what I start and it’s a trilogy so . . .) First one was fine–fun, even, second was tedious, third was about as sexy as a trip to the dentist–mainly because the entire series is basically one sex scene which is hashed and re-hashed with ever-diminishing creativity. Writing is abysmal.

My real issue here is not with the books, but with the reaction thereto. Calling this drivel “mommy porn” is insulting to both mommies and actual porn/erotica. Its pretty tame as BDSM goes, and it’s between two consenting, grown-ass people, so all the knee-jerking about abuse and control is entirely misplaced and, I presume, carried on by people who think anything requiring more flexibility than after-dark missionary is somehow perverse.

It’s sex: most of us like it, it’s fun to read about, there are endless permutations. The fact that one stupid series has caused such a kerfuffle makes me sad, because it seems to I dictate that times have changed little since the release of The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, which everyone’s mother kept shoved to the back of their nichstand. It’s good, I guess, that we can now talk about it, but sad and pathetic that the conversation has apparently only reached the sixth grade level. “oh my god they’re, like, doing WHAT???”

The abuse and control criticisms, at least from what I’ve read, have to do with the actual relationships of the characters and not the sex itself–for example, the way Christian controls Ana as a person.

Those “gut rumblings” n-at are called Borborygmi. My spelling might be off, I’ve seen several ways. Also, my uncle (Unk) called it a ‘slippery grip”. As in, “We gotta’ git home quick. It’s not that heavy a load, I just got a slippery grip on it”. Enjoy that image for a bit!

A couple of weeks ago on the DVE morning show they were doing dramatic readings from 50 Shades of Grey. Frank Caliendo was one of their guests and he was reading it as John Madden and it was HILARIOUS.

If you are actually interested in reading something sexy that is also well-written check out Gwyn Cready. She’s a romance writer from Mt. Lebanon and all of her books are Pittsburgh set and way steamy.

BTW, as the parent of a potty-training 2yo, I spend most of my days right now listening for agillitation.